MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—At Wednesday's Inbox Love conference held at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, the founders of Lavabit and Silent Circle announced that they want to change the world of e-mail completely by putting privacy and security at its core.

The two companies collaborated to create the DarkMail Alliance, a soon-to-be-formed non-profit organization that would be in charge of maintaining and organizing the open-source code for its new e-mail protocol. The new protocol will be based on Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, and it's set to be released in mid-2014. The group will ditch the old protocol, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), which is used for almost every bit of e-mail on the Internet.

“This is just another transport—what we’re getting rid of is SMTP,” said Jon Callas, the CTO at Silent Circle. “We like to laugh at it, but there are reasons why it was a good system. We’re replacing the transport with a new transport. E-mail was designed 40 years ago when everybody on the Internet knew each other and were friends.”

The organizers say that DarkMail will be available as an add-on or an option to existing e-mail providers—so Gmail could use it if Google chose to participate. The service is meant to incorporate a lot of high-end security features in a way that's not noticeable to regular users, like end-to-end encryption and perfect forward secrecy. The organizers have not released any technical details as of yet, but they promised that their setup would be open-source.

“You start out with security, and for those who need security dialed down, you dial it down,” Callas told the conference, saying that his company’s existing Silent Circle Instant Messaging Protocol (PDF) was a rough “alpha” of the new DarkMail protocol.

“E-mail has no security, and you’re forced to dial it up, and you can only dial it up to a certain point," he continued. "We want it to be flexible, and we want it to be able to be the sort of thing that you can use in high security environments... The default is that everything is end-to-end secure. This is because we’ve known, and [Lavabit founder Ladar Levison] has shown quite dramatically, that if you’re holding the information, it can be requested of you.”

Levison added that he wanted DarkMail to be “easy enough that Grandma can use it. Our hope is that someday in the near future that anybody who uses e-mail today can use a DarkMail client.”

Further Reading

Although Levison shut down Lavabit in the wake of the Edward Snowden case, he said that the “next best thing is 100 Lavabit-like services.”

Levison told Ars that he will soon launch—possibly as soon as Tuesday—a Kickstarter campaign to fundraise for the DarkMail Alliance to open-source Lavabit’s code “with support for DarkMail built-in.” The first 32 companies to donate $10,000 will get a pre-release 60 days before the public gets it so that those companies can integrate it into their systems first.

Gettin’ Diffie-Hellman with it

Before the announcement, Levison took questions from Jared Goralnick, the founder and CEO of AwayFind. Goralnick asked if, knowing what Levison knows now, he would have done things differently in terms of how he designed Lavabit.

“Knowing that they’re coming after SSL keys—for starters I would have made sure that all my systems support Diffie-Hellman,” he said. “The recent addition that provides an extra exchange for a negotiation process that makes it impossible to find out the session key, even if [the authorities] have the private key. It effectively would have forced them to do a man-in-the-middle attack instead of a third-party eavesdropping. It also means that if you’re forced to turn over keys in the future, they wouldn't be able to go back and decipher.”

Levison noted that when he handed over the SSL keys to the government—a move that he continues to fight—"if they had been recording as soon as they had those keys, they could go back and see what people were typing. It’s about limiting the damage.”

“The other thing I would have considered was doing a [hardware security module] and load them into hardware and make them impossible to turn over once they were generated,” he added. “What I’ve also found out is that the NSA likes to record encrypted information that it sucks up on the Internet, and they stick it in a gigantic database in hopes that one day they will decrypt it. There are a bunch of people, ranging from criminal gangs to government intel agencies, going around trying to intercept those keys in any way possible. We as a community need to appreciate that fact and start working on improving the human aspect of it in terms of keeping those keys secure. How many of you encrypt your SSL keys on disk? Anyone have to type in a password when Apache starts up?”

No hands went up in the room of about 100 people working in the e-mail industry.

“If someone images your disk, they have your private key,” he said.

Levison and the other organizers acknowledged that adding on more layers of security to e-mail shared across multiple devices (a computer, a tablet, and a phone for example) may make things a little more difficult to gain widespread adoption. But they’re already thinking of possible solutions.

“One of the possibilities is that you could activate your second device, and it would generate its own key, much like [how] XMPP works,” Levison told Ars.

'Levison noted that when he handed over the SSL keys to the government—a move that he continues to fight—”if they had been recording as soon as they had those keys they could go back and see what people were typing. It’s about limiting the damage.”'

I'm confused here. I thought he didn't hand over the SSL keys, but pulled the plug on the service instead.

He did end up giving them the SSL key, digitally, after the print-out didn't fly with the judge. He closed shop so they would have nothing to use it on, but because the judge ordered him to hand over the key, failure to do so would have put him in jail (or at least fined an ever-increasing amount of money, forever).

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar